Boxing: A Love Story

I’m often asked by business associates or upper middle class clients of mine why I love boxing so much, or more commonly, “What’s up with you & boxing?” Well to distill my response into a one or two line response at times proves itself to be a difficult task; so let me utilize this platform to articulate fully & comprehensively just what it is that is “up” with me and the sweet science of boxing.

Pugilism, fistic combat, throwing down, going toe to toe is more than a sport to myself and millions of people around the world; as Joyce Carol Oates noted, of ring warfare in her 1987 tome “On Boxing”, “I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing — for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you… Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects.”

Boxing offers society a rare avenue to witness the evolutionary spirit at violent work in a public sphere.

Additional to these rather introspective epiphany-caliber undertones the sport’s pre-event analysis, anticipation & suspense are of near impossible to match levels in other organized sporting codes. Crucially though there is an authenticity to two athletes fighting (literally) for supremacy that renders, say, baseball or football somewhat arbitrary & random by comparison. With all due respect those are sporting codes whose rules and regulations are exogenous impositions – boxing has a realness to it that cuts to the very evolutionary spirit that has sustained the human species down the millenia. Kill or get killed. Dominate or perish.

When a soccer player scores a goal, the only meaning of the event is that which society places upon it beyond an inflated sheep’s bladder covered in leather/synthetic material going into a net on a field somewhere; in boxing victory is earned via sacrifice of one’s safety & the embracing of one’s primal instinct for self-preservation to a degree exceeding that of one’s opponent.

Those are but a few of the reasons I love boxing. Talking about, watching it, writing about it – boxing is a trans-generational barometer of the human condition.